Drive Growth with a North Star Metric

I’ve been reaching out to business leaders to ask them about their North Star metric. The North Star metric is defined by Sean Ellis as:

The North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers. Optimizing your efforts to grow this metric is key to driving sustainable growth across your full customer base.

This is the one metric that everyone in the company should be striving to improve.

Facebook, Twitter, and other successful companies have used this approach of having one principle metric that everyone pushes towards.

Facebook: monthly active users

AirBnB: monthly active users

Twitter: people who logged in at least 7 times a month

Facebook for instance pushed monthly active users as its North Star metric. They put this metric front and center and enabled it to anchor every decision every person at Facebook made. That way, when anyone in engineering, accounting, marketing did anything the ultimate question was “is this going to improve active monthly users?”

Based on conversations, not too many people I spoke to have a North Star metric or are measuring it.

As we head into 2018 I urge you to think about your North Star metric. Once you have your North Star metric, place it front and center so everyone in your company can be guided by it.

Starting in 2018, we’re going to be strongly encourage our clients and partners to first determine their North Star metric, and second to measure and display it prominently for everyone to see.